My thoughts on the role of the Church in the Nigerian Healthcare space.
This weekend we all witnessed or heard about the popular gospel musician who died from expired malaria drug at a teaching hospital in Delta state. I’ve tried to imagine how this man’s young wife and kid will be taking all of this at the moment. This is one loss and pain that no one wishes to be in, and my heart completely goes out to his family.
In Nigeria, when bad things happen to people, it almost feels like there’s this general consensus that it happened because it’s God’s will. No one tries to identify what the cause is, who is at fault , who should be responsible, or how do we prevent this? No!, that never happens. People just move on to the next thing.
The question that has continued to trouble my mind this weekend is this; “what is the role of the church where government fails in its responsibilities. Shouldn’t the church step up in these circumstances.
I know a lot of people will argue about how we need to separate the church from government, but in Nigeria today, the current acting President didn’t just sit in a church pew, he stood behind the pulpit. Now, you see how the church’s vision and community service would have easily translated into public service if it had one.
The church in Nigeria today looks like a gathering of hippies speaking Christianese every Sunday but lacking power. Our pastors are busy organizing hipster conferences with Jet owning, tithes dependent American pastors who fly miles just to tell them same thing they could have read themselves. Truth be told, if you have to wait for an American pastor to fly all the way from Tulsa to tell you your faith needs to be as small as a mustard seed, then you have a very small mind, and there’s everything in the world wrong with your kind of Christianity.
The gospel is all about service, it’s about being Agents of change. James 1:27- “Pure religion and undefined before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world”.
If Bill Gates can be magnanimous enough to craft an agenda and a vision to end malaria, by the way, sub-saharan Africa has the highest share of global malaria burden, what then are our churches with a high record of people every Sunday doing? I tell you, 4 Nigerian churches can team up and craft a vision as big and make resources available. Yes they can!
I’ve told this story before and I will again. I went to business school in a small midwestern town in Kansas. Right in this small city is a big hospital, bigger than any hospital I have ever been to in Nigeria, and guess what, it’s a Christian hospital. It was started by the church. www.viachristi.org
I have witness how churches in Nigeria aggressively raise millions of dollars to build worship auditorium that will be used ONLY on Sundays, what about hospitals, what about schools in poor communities?
The church should step up!
